As the saying goes, if the left didn’t have double-standards, they wouldn’t have any. Last week’s proof comes from – surprise, surprise! – Australia’s taxpayer-funded Marxist propaganda behemoth, sorry, ‘national broadcaster’. The same outfit that went into fainting fits over a cartoon witch’s hat is trying to pretend that airing a grotesque snuff fantasy is just fine.
As reported by the Good Oil some months back, the ABC, along with the rest of the left, went into full meltdown over a simple billboard with a cheeky message: Ditch the Witch. With an accompanying cartoon of then Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan in a witch’s hat. That was it. Yet, the ABC went into screaming fits about it.
Anthony Albanese, Julia Gillard join Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan in denouncing sexist billboards. Note that they’re not hiding their opinion here: ‘sexist billboards’. That’s the ABC’s own opinion (misleadingly, in a grotesque breach of journalistic ethics) being reported as ‘fact’. The ABC, along with the rest of the left-media (which is to say, practically the entirety of the legacy media) ran blanket coverage for days, crying that the billboard was ‘dangerous’, and would lead directly to violence against women. In fact, the ABC explicitly linked it to four deaths.
If a cartoon witch’s hat and single word are going to encourage violence against women, imagine the holocaust of ‘femicide’ this will unleash:
“Because when the revolution comes, will you hide under your bed or will you know exactly how to shove a stick right up Gina Rinehart’s butthole, stirring it round, mixing her guts up nice and smooth, making her into one big sausage roll, to make something outta nothing.”
That’s not just calling someone a cartoonish name: that’s a direct incitement to the sort of violence Hamas unleashed on October 7, 2023. And it was broadcast by the ABC itself.
Don’t count on the Ultimo Collective to even see a problem, though.
On Friday, the ABC defended McGuinness’s comments as being “satirical in tone”.
The broadcaster’s defence of the short film has prompted the Minerals Council of Australia to accuse the national broadcaster of breaching its own editorial guidelines by airing the offensive content, and failing to uphold community standards.
“As a taxpayer-funded media outlet with national reach including throughout regional Australia, the ABC has a responsibility to be a role model especially when it comes to taking a stand against violence towards women,” MCA chief executive Tania Constable wrote in an official letter of complaint to the ABC this week.
“It has failed miserably in its obligations to be a role model, and is in clear breach of its own editorial policies.”
Communications Minister Anika Wells, taking time out from finding new ways to get taxpayers to fund her and her family’s holidays, conceded her “personal view is it’s unacceptable” – before promptly passing the buck. The one person more than any other in Australia whose job it is to hold the ABC to its statutory obligation, mumbled excuses that the matter had been referred to the ABC’s own ombudsman, an internal office that reports to the board. In other words, the fox will investigate the slaughter in the henhouse.
Whatever one thinks of Gina Rinehart’s politics, the double standard is jaw-dropping. Would the same ‘satire’ have been waved through if the target were Penny Wong or Tanya Plibersek? The question answers itself. The left’s selective outrage is not about protecting women: it is about protecting the correct women.
Rinehart’s actual record is inconvenient for the narrative. She has poured personal money into Australian sport, particularly women’s sport, bankrolling athletes who would otherwise have struggled. Yet at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, swimmers were forbidden even to thank her publicly. Gratitude toward the wrong billionaire is apparently more dangerous than a cartoon witch’s hat.
The real sin, of course, is that she has dared to put some of that money behind Pauline Hanson. That other billionaires, from Richard Pratt’s cardboard empire to various CCP-linked operators, openly bankroll the Labor Party is never mentioned. The ABC’s selective blindness is not new. A few years ago it published a photoshopped image of centre-right journalist Chris Kenny having sex with a dog and, when challenged, refused either to remove it or apologise. Same network, same moral calculus: violence and degradation are fine so long as the victim is on the wrong side of the culture war.
A cartoon hat is “dangerous”. Graphic instructions for torturing and murdering a living woman are “satire”. When the left runs out of double standards, it will have run out of principles entirely.
And the broadcaster that whined about “a culture that treats women so poorly” needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror – after it’s been stripped of all taxpayer funding.
